Lift the cover—November’s cider light
tumbles onto the crisp crackle of dry leaves
and huge green leathery ones to be held with both hands.
Others brittle like insect legs
in a stack that smells of brown paper and worms
your hands red and dusty from clutching tree bark

and then you drop an
immeasurable
distance with a gleeful whoop
with a swishing scrunch
you sink up to your chilly neck
into a vast sea of bitten yellow that will take an effort
to swim out of.

And your nose is red and running,
inhaling the sour turpentine smell
as you leap into fleecy arms
then close the sticky rust pleather cover with
its sharp burnished corners
and sink back into the pounding head
of today.